I mean, in principle, you could also buy a much cheaper firearm (say, a shotgun) from Wal-Mart, and use an affordable consumer-grade 3D printer to print up a cheap plastic shell that it fits neatly into, that makes it look like a toy guitar or light saber or whatever. Granted, that would get noticed by a metal detector.

The argument I find most interesting in this debate is the economic one, though. 3D printers that are good enough to print a practical firearm, are *outrageously* expensive, closer to the price of a house, than the price of a normal, legal firearm. Fundamentally, mass produced items are always going to be cheaper than one-off equivalents, because the whole process of making them, including the purchase of the materials, can be optimized. So in theory, anybody whose interest in firearms is of a practical nature, should just go buy a mass-produced one (or three, or seventy-three, or however many you think you need for whatever hunting trip you have planned or whatever). The 3D-printed ones are mainly appealing to enthusiasts and hobbyists and whatnot, for reasons that are not pragmatic in nature. I'm not quite sure which side of the debate over their legality this most argues for (which is probably why nobody brings it up much), but I think it's worth taking into consideration one way or the other, and also I think it's more _interesting_ than most of the issues that do get discussed to death every time the topic comes up.

I want to be able to take out 2-4 screws, maybe pull a latch, and the case opens. At that point I want to be able to easily swap out things like RAM or the hard drive (either for higher capacity, or as a repair). I want to be able to easily replace the parts that break most often, such as the power supply and cable and, most importantly, the _hinge_ with standard items that aren't specific to a particular product line of laptop. Ideally, I'd like to be able to swap out the case, the display, or the motherboard.

Basically, I want a standard form factor for laptops, the equivalent of what ATX is for mid-towers. I don't want to have to throw away the laptop if one thing breaks, three months after the warranty expires.

Show me all of that, and decent specs, and a full-sized keyboard, and all of it works with open-source software, and I'll pay premium prices.

I mean, the chlorine solution will kill any cell it touches, so if you apply it specifically to the cancer cells, that *will* work. Heck, if anything, chlorine is overkill, iodine would work.

The issue is more that there are likely to be better options. If you can identify the edges of the tumor with the required level of precision, you can probably just surgically remove it, or cauterize it, or whatever.

Oh, there's *lots* of boatloads of evidence that high concentrations of chlorine like this, will definitely kill cancer cells.

It'll also kill bacteria, and most fungi, and most parasites. And destroy viruses. Heck, it'll kill most insects on contact. Halogen ions in general are powerfully anti-organic, and chlorine is the second strongest of them (behind only fluorine). The medical community has used iodine solutions as topical disinfectant for decades; that works great, and chlorine is stronger. In fact, pretty much the only reason bleach is safe to handle at all, is because you have a nice thick (by chemical standards) outer layer of skin, that is already dead anyway.

Oh, you wanted evidence that the treatment is _safe_ ? Oh, that's different then. Though honestly, a lot of cancer treatments are kinda dubious in that regard. Even quite hawkish regulatory agency like the US FDA, tend to apply a standard somewhere in the vicinity of "statistically at least marginally safer than letting the cancer keep going unchecked, we think". Word of mouth among cancer survivors is that if you're tough enough to get through all the chemo and radiation and whatnot that they can throw at you, without crying uncle, then you can probably beat the cancer too.

Sterile water is relatively cheap and easy to obtain and to store. If you can acquire and store this new product in case of emergencies, you can also acquire (in advance) and store the water.

The scenarios where this is potentially going to save lives, compared to the current system, mostly involve remote areas with sparse population where it's impractical to maintain blood reserves. Everywhere else, what it's going to do (assuming eventual full success), is reduce the quantity of blood donation society requires, and the expense of keeping it all fresh and rotated and so on. Which sounds a lot less dramatic but is valuable nonetheless.

I think the article was asserting that the instructions were "dangerous" because they involved burning and cutting oneself on purpose, among other things, not because anyone thought ChatGPT's instructions might actually result in a demon being summoned.

Though, if you believe in Evolution, then you should probably consider instructions like that a net good for the genome, because anyone who would follow them is, ipso facto, extremely gullible and suggestible and not very good at making decisions.

He probably means the small amounts of various metals (lithium, transition metals, lanthanides, ...) found in anything electronic. Many of which are toxic in high concentration, but totally natural in low concentration. He presumably just hasn't thought through all the implications of where they come from in the first place and what it is about the human activity surrounding them, that makes them toxic. Either that or he vastly underestimates how expensive it is to get any significant quantity of anything into orbit, and therefore over-estimates the concentration that's achievable in the atmosphere by human activity. Perhaps both.

Yeah, but it's important for the Chinese domestic market, because it's enough of a pain to get foreign companies to cooperate with the Chinese government when they have to have physical infrastructure (like cell towers) on Chinese soil; they find ways to manage it, but it's a hassle. If the foreign company has *no* meaningful assets inside mainland China (because they're in space), it would be even more of a hassle, and China would like to avoid that scenario.

We can expect foreign options like Starlink to be illegal to import to China, as soon as they have a domestic alternative up and running.

This is also why Baidu and Weibo and so on exist.

Yes, I came to the comment section to say essentially this. Economists commonly call this condition "Dutch Disease", for historical reasons involving the mid twentieth century. The short explanation is, if one specific sector (commonly, resource extraction) becomes disproportionately profitable, it drives demand for your currency overseas, shifting the exchange rates in a way that makes your other products less competitive, making it difficult to maintain or develop a balanced or diverse economy. (This is, of course, a simplification; but it's a good simplification, very useful for beginners to wrap their minds around the basics before digging into more detail later.)

I would argue that our modern concept of rule of law, comes from Achemenid Persia, which had a meaningful system for holding the people who made the laws, accountable for also following them.

The copyright stuff is a side issue. Wrap your head around this:

> officials are not required to disclose what exactly the charges are or who
> has brought them until the initial investigation is complete under Italian law

That is a *terrifying* abuse of power. They can show up to your house and just take you and your stuff into custody and NOT SAY WHY until their investigation is complete.

That is so many kinds of horrifying.

Eh, that's probably true for a lot of people on Slashdot, who have actual stuff they care about on their devices. For someone like my mom, it wouldn't matter: if her phone were seized for some reason, the thing she'd be upset about would be the cost of the phone itself. (It's not even an expensive model. It's the one the phone company sent her when they shut down the 3G network in the area, because her previous phone did not support 4G.)

Regardless of that, there are some borders that you just shouldn't cross, at all, or at least not without an exceptionally good reason. The PROC is rapidly rising up the list of countries that are really not safe for Westerners to visit. I mean, it's not as high on the list as e.g. Myanmar, but nonetheless it's really not a good choice at this point. Be safe: go to Taiwan, or Japan, or Indonesia, even. And that goes double if you have family or friends in China, because visiting them there endangers them more than it endangers you.

And yes, this article is about people who are visiting China from overseas, specifically. For anybody with a mainland-Chinese cellphone carrier, this is entirely moot: the CCP already has all of the data from those, that's not news.

If they were doing this in 1985, or even 1995, I might think they were attempting to re-invent the IMAX format. But in 2025, with a quote in the summary about box office revenues for blockbuster Hollywood films, I don't think that's necessarily what's going on.

Rather, I think a lot of people have gotten so used to watching movies at home, that they don't bother going to the movie theater at all unless it's to see the film "on the big screen". Cinema revenues have therefore dropped so much, that the modest number of people who go to an IMAX theatre to see Hollywood's schlock on an even bigger screen (which is not at all the same thing as going to an IMAX theatre to see an actual IMAX production), are starting to look like a significant chunk of market share, and the (surviving) cinema chains are looking at at that, going, "Why is their screen bigger than ours?" So they put in bigger screens, but people don't know about it and don't suddenly flock to it, because IMAX is already famous for having the biggest screens. So now the theaters want to market the fact that they've got big screens. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it won't stop movie theaters from rapidly becoming a fundamentally obsolete business model. It puts me horribly in mind of West Virginia, in the mid twentieth century, when coal mining was becoming less and less profitable, and instead of moving to diversify into other industries, like everyplace else that had been relying on coal mines as a major source of economic activity, the entire state of West Virginia collectively went, let's double down on coal mining and corner the market, and push coal from 60% of our economy, up to 80% or more of our economy, nothing can go wrong with this plan.

Depends on which version of each respective OS we're talking about (especially on the Windows side), and on your system specs, and also on what software you're running; but mostly, yes. Especially these days.

If they really want to save battery life and improve performance, they should start by fixing the Windows Updates system so it doesn't try to store half the internet in virtual memory whenever it's downloading updates, because that results in a *lot* of swapping; and relatedly they should rip out the Eight/Ten/Eleven virtual memory subsystem and replace it with something that occasionally swaps out a page that is NOT going to be the very next one needed. Even the NT vm system that Seven had, was better, and that is pretty dire. (This happens to be an area where Linux does pretty well, at least in my experience, although of course no vm system will ever be as good as just having enough physical RAM to hold everything.)

Oh, and they need to add an API for third-party installers to call to say "here is the URL to check for a list of updates in this publicly documented format", so their new Windows Updates subsystem that they need to rewrite from scratch anyway, can also handle updates for third-party web browsers and PDF viewers and so on and so forth, so there aren't a dozen different update services running in the background all the time.

Oh, I am sure it will be fine. Nothing can possibly go wrong. When has a California state government policy ever caused any problems at all?

Honestly, it'll probably even be entertaining to watch. For those of us living elsewhere. Such as here in the Midwest, for instance. If we have a sufficiently dark sense of humor.